Early on in my design career, before I was feeling as confident in my abilities as I do today, I used to worry that I was charging too much for the work I was doing. I suspect that there are many designers (or artists or musicians or writers) in their early careers that feel this way. I think we tend to undervalue the things that we really enjoy doing, and we do ourselves a disservice by compromising the true value of our work in exchange for the privilege of being able to continue to do that very work. As a musician, I’ve been very fortunate to have a parent who is also a professional musician, so I never had this problem when it came to setting prices for performing because once I started performing for pay, she instilled in me the importance of being fairly compensated for my time and talent. But since I came to design from a fairly circuitous route, I found it difficult to do the same thing, largely because that little defeatist voice in my head told me that I didn’t have the appropriate credentials to be fairly compensated. I suspect this isn’t uncommon.
When it came to logo design work, it didn’t help matters that there were an abundance of websites offering to provide clients with an original logo for $99. How was I supposed to compete with that?
Luckily, I also found the HOW Design forum early on in my career. It was filled with lots of professional designers talking about all sorts of topics ranging from specific design program advice to how to run a design studio to what to charge. What I quickly learned was that, in fact, I wasn’t supposed to compete with those $99 logo websites. I learned that those sites do little more than to devalue the field of design, similar to clients who ask you to create work on spec, or to “improve your portfolio.” And usually, the work from those sites falls into the you-get-what-you-pay-for category–bland designs that look like they were made by a design robot. Which, in a manner of speaking, they were.
